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The State Of The Wayland Display Server

05-20-2009, 06:00 AM

Phoronix: The State Of The Wayland Display Server

Last year the Wayland Display Server project was started by Kristian Hogsberg, a Red Hat developer and a name known well within the X.Org community for his work on AIGLX, Direct Rendering Infrastructure 2, and various other projects. We were first to talk about the Wayland Display Server in detail, which aims to provide a mini display server that is designed around the latest X/kernel technologies like the Graphics Execution Manager and kernel mode-setting. Wayland also integrates its own compositing manager and is designed to produce a perfect frame (a.k.a. no tearing) each and every time. There has not been much to report on this project recently, but we now have a status update courtesy of Kristian.

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He is also looking at the possibility of running a rootless X Server on Wayland so that Wayland can pull windows from the X Server into the currently running Wayland server session. This feature would be very interesting.

Does this mean that in the future a Wayland could be helping in providing graphics for some of the windows in a running X.org server?

There has been a lot buzz on hybrid graphics and it's status in Linux. Is it possible that in the future a Wayland server could be plugged to the hot-switchable graphics card in the laptop, that is turned on/off without reboot depending on the required tasks, whereas the main X.org could be using the other graphics card?

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Does this mean that in the future a Wayland could be helping in providing graphics for some of the windows in a running X.org server?

Other way around - Wayland would be rendering and compositing the desktop, but this would only let you use client drawn apps. So there would be an X server running rootless so you could use legacy apps. The X applications would then be pulled from the X server and would be composted with the normal ones.